DUE TO A COMBINATION of unfortunate circumstances, following the takeover of the museum, Rabbi Herzl Lieb missed the opening salvos at the epicenter of the action outside the building, which coalesced on the Fourteenth Street side across from the Department of Agriculture, demarcated by barriers swiftly erected and patrolled by the police of the District of Columbia. Regrettably, however, during those critical first moments, Herzl was on the patch of Park Department turf on the Fifteenth Street side to which he and his demonstration had been consigned that morning, renamed for that stretch Raoul Wallenberg Place, where he had chained himself by the waist to a tree, and sweating extravagantly on this sweltering day under the blanket of his capacious cream wool fringed prayer shawl with its licorice-black stripes and neckpiece trimming of embroidered silver and gold threads, was blowing his heart out through a shofar. Planted in the ground beside him was a cluster of signs and posters on sticks. One depicted Abu Shahid in full face and profile, with the caption “Wanted: Terrorist, Murderer, Holocaust Denier,” and then in bloodred capital letters, the question, “Should This Man Be Welcomed into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum?” Another showed a photograph of heaps of charred and emaciated Jewish cadavers discovered in the camps after the war juxtaposed against a picture of a smiling Dalai Lama in tinted aviator glasses licking an ice cream cone, with the Hebrew word Lehavdil scrawled boldly across, and in English, “How Can You Compare?” And yet another declared in banner block letters, “Maurice Messer, You’ve Made a Mess of Morality and Memory and the Museum—Move Aside!” Peering through binoculars from the tall window of the director’s office in the red brick administration building across Raoul Wallenberg Place that morning, Maurice had clutched his breast in bitterness as if physically struck by this crude ad hominem shot and was muttering, “I’ll move aside your little schmeckie, that’s what I’ll move aside, you momzer,” just as Abu Shahid was being ushered into the room by Bunny, followed by a uniformed steward rolling in a table covered with a crisp white linen cloth, heaped with fruits and pastries on china plates, fragrant, steaming coffee and tea in silver pitchers, and a sprig of white orchid tinged with mauve in a crystal vase in the center.
While Herzl remained attached to his tree, Henny Soskis was taking a break from protesting, sitting atop the coffin meant to represent the six million, which was one of Herzl’s signature props and visual aids in Holocaust-related demonstrations, generously provided free of charge by one of his legion of admirers, Alvin Tepel of Tepel and Tepel Funeral Arrangements. Al always came through like a trouper with exemplary good humor every single time the Jewish people were in danger. “Your coffin’s on the way, Rabbi, top of the line, you don’t have to hold your breath.” Al never failed him. Sitting herself down on this sturdy, deluxe coffin, Henny Soskis let out a profound sigh and, staking her well-earned claim, announced, “I’m sure the six million won’t mind this close personal contact with an old survivor’s fat tuches.”
Really, it was much too hot for a protest, Henny reflected as she fanned herself vigorously with a bunch of the flyers she had been passing out. Her dress, which she had bought on sale in the back room of Loehmann’s in Rockville for $49.95 with the designer label torn out after seeing the same exact number at Saks for five times as much, was soaked through and through, sticking to her skin like a brisket; her pastel-colored hair, which she had just had done the day before at Marie’s beauty parlor on the basement level of her senior citizen’s retirement complex in Silver Spring, had collapsed like cotton candy—but what could she do? Herzl was so intense and persistent, so devoted to the Jewish people, she could never say no to him. If only they had had someone like Rabbi Herzl Lieb during the war, she always commented to the ladies in her synagogue sisterhood, it would have been a whole different story entirely, believe me.
But of course, all the other survivors had no trouble whatsoever refusing Herzl. And it wasn’t just the temperature, as in this particular instance. It was the heat all of the time, it was the pressure and the fear. Herzl was too noisy, too radical, too in-your-face and over-the-top. Establishment Jews cringed at his shenanigans, and gentiles got this nauseated look on their faces, not to mention the fact that he regularly infuriated the great survivor-in-chief Maurice Messer, so that if it became known that they were associated with this public enemy number one, all of those nice invitations to museum functions might come screeching to a halt, especially to those fancy receptions in the children’s tile wall area on the concourse level with those tasty little noshes and the white wine, strictly kosher, a meal in itself actually, and for dessert, a political smorgasbord, a veritable Viennese table of big shots strolling around with name tags like a list of their ingredients, you could stuff yourself on them as much as you wanted until you were ready to bust.
But she, Henny, she was not afraid of Maurice Messer, not one iota, there was no way in the world he would dare to black-ball her if he knew what was good for him; on the contrary, he was afraid of her. She had beaten him once soundly, schmeissed him good, when he was prepared to desecrate the dead by putting bales of their shorn hair on display in the museum exhibition for their sensationalistic value, and, if necessary, she was ready to go after him again if he tried any of his monkey business with her—she would not hesitate for one minute, and he knew it, she knew his secrets and his lies, she knew him inside out. All it had taken to deflate him during that ugly hair feud was a little word to the president of the United States himself from the brilliant mouth of her granddaughter the intern just like a doctor M.D., her beautiful and exceptional Samantha Brittney, and Maurice had retreated in a flash, coward that he was.
Oh yes, Maurice was a famous coward, everyone knew that, it was far from a secret. That was why, as her son Arnold the psychologist also almost exactly like a doctor M.D., Samantha Brittney’s daddy in fact, had once explained to her, Maurice always made such a federal case about how he was never afraid, it was a well-known mental health symptom called overcopulating or something like that. Even during the war he was a coward—shaking, tzittering, pishing in his pants, getting up the nerve once in a blue moon to venture out at night to steal a sick chicken, trembling at every sound, a liability; they had let him join their hiding place in the woods only after he had promised on everything that’s holy to marry the sister with the limp of one of the leaders, a promise he had promptly broken after the war the minute he met his hoity-toity Blanche Bialystok from Bialystok in her little maroon velvet cloche with the veil and the feather. Among the survivors, it was simply the biggest inside joke in the world that he now passed himself off as a resistance fighter commander during the Holocaust. The only reason the ones who remembered him from those days who weren’t themselves in danger of reciprocal exposure due to their own concocted stories about their exploits during the war refrained from coming forward to denounce Maurice was because they were afraid the disclosure of the lies of such a prominent Holocaust operator would be grist for the mill of the deniers and revisionists and skinheads. If the story of the chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was made up, who could say what else might also be made up, perhaps even the gas chambers themselves—and without the gas chambers, ladies and gentlemen, where would we be? Just another ordinary genocide, that’s where, our status as the Holocaust lost like innocence. But if not for this very real worry and concern, Henny knew that there was nothing the other survivors would have enjoyed more than to witness this pompous old liar, this self-promoter at the expense of the dead, this Holocaust hustler, this Shoah shyster, brought down low, exposed and disgraced, twisting slowly in the fire like a broiler on the spit.
Still, Henny could not help wondering—what was she doing here on such a hot day, she, a seventy-six-year-old widow, sweating and schvitzing on top of a coffin not too different, she figured, from one she would probably in the not too distant future be stretched out inside, as if she were in training? It was a good question. The answer very simply was that she was not thinking about her own comfort, but about the survival of her people now facing the hidden Holocausts of intermarriage and assimilation, against which the only defense was strengthening Jewish identity through personal awareness of past and potential victimization. And Henny was not afraid. What did she have to be afraid of after all she had gone through in the first and still number-one Holocaust—ghettos, cattle cars, selections, death camps, forced marches, and so on and so forth through all the stations of the iron cross. Never mind her arthritis and her bunions and her headaches brought on by aggravation. She had come out even in this terrible temperature to stand beside Rabbi Herzl Lieb, to raise a voice of conscience against inviting terrorists and Tibetans into this temple to the six million. Meanwhile, her fellow survivors, lazy bums one and all, stayed home safe from heatstroke and dehydration, watching their soap operas and polishing their dentures.
Of course, Lipman Krakowski had also come out in this heat and humidity to stand with her and the rabbi, though at the moment he was out of commission, he had gone off to use the facilities in the museum’s air-conditioned administration building. He had taken along the New York Times and the Washington Post, which he pored over meticulously front to back, including the sports and classified sections and the obituaries, one of his favorites, as well as every morsel of wisdom in the editorials, sometimes even dashing off a letter to the editor while still perched on the pot, depending on the level of inspiration that seized him, he carried a pencil and pad wherever he went for just such emergencies. The newspapers, as Lipman explained, were extremely relaxing, at one and the same time expanding mind and body. So Henny knew for a fact that she would not be seeing him for a while. She also knew that even though they were engaged in protesting against the museum, there was no question that Lipman would be allowed into the building to use the men’s room; staff bureaucrats would never risk refusing him access, impressed with a deep awareness of the horrifying ruckus he was capable of stirring up if provoked. The scandal would be plastered across all the newspapers the next day: “Holocaust Museum Toilet Denied to Survivor in Distress.” Scandal was the one thing this museum dreaded above all, and Lipman knew it. Given the nature of its self-righteous subject matter with its attendant vulnerability to ethical scrutiny, and given the sucking up and selling out it was required to do simply to exist much less survive, as Lipman was very well aware, it set an enormously high premium on the appearance of impeccable virtue—like a professional virgin, Lipman thought appreciatively, condemned forever to protest her virginity.
“I’ll give you a full report,” Lipman said cheerily to Henny as he set off with the newspapers under his arm. He did not mean a report about what he would encounter as he tried to get into the building; there was no doubt at all in the mind of either one of them that he would be admitted without a murmur. Rather, as Henny understood very well, he meant a full report about the outcome and success of his session in the stall, a sacred, inviolable hour during which no disturbance would be tolerated or forgiven, but about which, afterward, he loved to hold forth at length and in detail. As Lipman always said, “At my age, a jumbo movement in the morning is the high point of the day.” And, on this particular occasion, he also meant that he would be coming back to her with a full report about the spectacular effects of the Metamucil apple crisp wafer he had ingested, the subject of a vehement argument they had been having over the past hour or so as they distributed their protest flyers, an argument made all the more irritating because Lipman was hard of hearing and Rabbi Herzl Lieb by the tree would not let up for one minute with his shofar blasting. For regularity, Lipman insisted, there was nothing to compare with Metamucil in all of its tasty varieties, solid and liquid—and also gas, ha ha ha; why, the oldest astronaut in the world, Senator John Glenn himself, refused to leave earth without it—because it made all systems go, ha ha. Henny, for her part, with equal ardor and adamancy, shouted into his ear until her voice was as rough as grit a testimonial to the superior efficacy of her own old-fashioned remedy, passed down from generation to generation, from mother to daughter—prune juice with a little hot water and a squeeze of lemon. Sitting there now on the coffin, she fished around in her overstuffed Frugal Fannie’s shopping bag to find her thermos bottle filled with this elixir, for the very practical reason that after Lipman returned from doing his business, then it would be her turn.
The truth was, Henny was thinking as she sipped her concoction, she had always had her doubts about the sincerity and genuineness of Lipman’s devotion to the well-being of the Jewish people. To give just one example, even when he narrated his oral testimony on Holocaust Remembrance Day in front of high school assemblies of bored kids jiggling around desperately inside their pants, for some unfathomably shameless reason he would always provocatively profess himself to be an atheist. “After all what I seen,” he would announce to the fascinated teenagers, “either this so-called God doesn’t exist, or if he does, I don’t want nothing to do with him.” Of course, Henny had to admit, these and other similarly outrageous stunts, such as identifying each Jewish girl in the audience to publicly appraise her face and figure in the interest of determining who might successfully evade the Nazis by blending in with the Aryans and who would not have a chance of passing, or singling out the prettiest blond cheerleader as an illustration of the type that for obvious uses and purposes would have been spared by the SS in the selection process, made him a great favorite on the juvenile Holocaust testimony circuit, utterly immune by virtue of age and a certified track record of suffering from corruption-of-youth charges and sexual harassment accusations. It was as if Lipman simply could not bear having grown old, Henny reflected, he was deliberately rebellious and contrary like an adolescent himself, which, in her opinion, was the true reason he had joined forces with her during the hair war and also why he was out here on this miserable day in this foul heat—not because of his concern for Jewish destiny but from sheer orneriness, the perverse thrill of standing out, of exhibiting himself, to demonstrate that there was still some juice left in him, to put the world on notice that he was not dead yet, to strut and to preen so that maybe the girls would turn their heads and flip him a salute one more time.
Henny sitting there on the coffin was so immersed in this analysis of Lipman Krakowski’s borderline character, drinking her prune-juice cocktail and enjoying the exercise of applying some of the mental health concepts such as infested development and cystic personality elucidated to her by her son Arnie the psychologist, that she was completely oblivious at first to the crowds pouring out of the museum. Nor had she noticed that Rabbi Herzl Lieb had quit blowing his shofar and, still tethered to his tree, was calling out to her in mounting frustration and anxiety to run and find out what was happening.
Run? She—Henny Soskis? The last time Henny had run was in 1945, with the SS panting behind her on the forced march from the extermination camp, and she weighed eighty pounds from starvation; now she tipped the scale at over two hundred and twenty. No, Henny did not do running, except maybe for vice president in charge of snacks of her synagogue’s ladies’ auxiliary club, if you counted that. Taking her time as befitted a woman of her age and size and history, Henny sealed up her thermos flask, stuffed it back into her shopping bag, and, creaking like a rusty old apparatus that had seen better days, hoisted herself up from the coffin onto her swollen legs in their high heels. As she made her way across the street to the museum, the great advancing shelf of her bosom leading the rest of her through the heavy air, she stopped a few of the more alert-looking goyim streaming out and discovered that the crisis was nothing more than a routine fire drill. But when she noticed the barriers going up on the Eisenhower Plaza and the line of uniformed guards closing ranks, she decided she had better investigate further. Barreling through the phalanx of officers with the cry, “Hitler tried to stop me—you also wanna try?” she made her way to the locked entrance. Adjusting on her nose the spectacles that dangled from a string of fake pearls around her neck, Henny read through the glass the sign that had been posted from the inside.
“It’s finally happened,” she reported to Herzl when she returned to the tree. “The takeover by the universalists that we were all expecting one day. A cholera on them all! What did I always tell you, Rabbi? We can just kiss our one-and-only Holocaust good-bye.”
Moreover, she informed Herzl, the “bystanders,” as she called them, namely the riffraff and slime that always appeared instantaneously the minute there was word of a disaster, spontaneously generated like maggots on rotting meat—the press, the politicians, the big shots and the big-shot wannabes, every single one of them with an opinion, the hucksters and hustlers and hangers-on, the vultures and buzzards, parasites and scavengers of every shape and size, indecent onlookers and weirdos and freaks of every race, religion, and creed—were collecting on the other side of the building, on the Fourteenth Street side. This is what she had been told by one of the guards, a very nice-looking young man, an American giant with a nose of such cavernous breadth that Henny could see directly inside by tilting her head back and looking up from below. The Fourteenth Street side of the museum was where all the action was, she advised Herzl in a let’s-face-facts tone. It was where they—she, Herzl, and Lipman—ought to go at once without wasting another minute, where they of all people had the right to be, where they above all belonged in this critical hour for Jewish history and memory. The only problem was, as both she and the rabbi understood without acknowledging it out loud, the two of them delicately averting their eyes from the chain that encircled Herzl’s waist and bound him in a grotesque union with the tree, Lipman was hopelessly unreachable at the moment—and it was Lipman who had the key.
To Lipman’s credit, however, when he finally did show up to liberate the rabbi, and the two men bearing the coffin with Henny bringing up the rear then raced within the limits of their individual speed plateaus to the Fourteenth Street side of the building, it was mainly thanks to his cultivated brazenness, Henny had to admit, that they were able to cut through the massing crowd and slide the coffin under the police barrier into the section directly in front of the museum reserved for the “privileged characters,” as Henny referred to them until she too gained entry into their midst. Taking the lead from Lipman, Henny turned up her bare arm below the elbow to display the blue concentration camp numbers, with Lipman crying out as they pushed boldly across the line, “Holocaust survivors coming through—wanna see our tattoos? What—you think maybe this is my telephone number in case I forget? Don’t try no funny business!” With this fanfare, they hauled the rabbi between them by his armpits with his shoes levitating off the ground into the restricted zone. It was a passkey into an exclusive society with an elite membership, the blue numbers burned into their flesh and seared between their eyes into the memories of their dying bodies. They were the crème de la crème of survivors, more authentically survivors than those who had also been in the camps but had not been branded, those who had been in work camps but not death camps, those who had been in the greatest number of camps for the most years, those who had been in ghettos but not camps, those who had survived by hiding, by blending in with the local populace, by fleeing to Russia, by being rescued by a Schindler or a Sugihara or a Sousa Mendes, those who had been evacuated on a Kindertransport, those who had been hidden as children in monasteries and convents and stables, those who could claim passage aboard the doomed ship Saint Louis, those who left Europe before the war but could boast the greatest number of family members killed, and so on and so forth down the survivor food chain. The blue numbers etched into their flesh were an indelible code that admitted them into the inner circle of the exclusive Holocaust club now, by popular demand, being opened to the general public.
Immediately, of course, all the other survivors similarly set apart who had gathered from the greater Washington metropolitan area and beyond also turned up their arms to flaunt their own numbers, the whole lot of them, Henny observed with disgust, the lesser and the superior survivors, too slothful and passive until now to take action against the assorted Holocaust poachers and deniers and minimizers and trivializers, finally condescending to make an appearance even in the face of the emergency heat warning directed emphatically toward the elderly, as word got out that their Holocaust was under siege from the competition. The numbered elite flapped their forearms in the stagnant air like ragged flags. “What about me? I’m not a survivor too? Who made them the boss?” But it was as if their voices could not project beyond the O of their mouths, like in a paralyzing dream, as if no sound could be emitted no matter how hard they tried to expel their protests. No one regarded them, no one recognized them for who they were. After Lipman and Henny with the rabbi dangling between them got through, the gate crashed down with a thud of finality and they were condemned to stand on the other side of the tracks with all those alien American nonentities whose history was transparent and whose suffering had borders.
“Thank you, dear friends, for lifting me up—in every respect,” the rabbi said when they finally set him down again in the VIP section.
Beyond the blockades, the mob of gawkers and gloaters was multiplying by the minute, Henny could see, flowing north to Independence Avenue and streaming onto the lawns of the Mall itself, packed not only with the malcontented survivors who huddled together for spiritual warmth and security like immigrants from a single country settling in the same neighborhood, but also with the full palette of America partaking of the communal entertainment of the latest news from the Jews. Represented in their numbers, among other onlookers and bystanders, was the stodgy majority citizenry of the District of Columbia in a spectrum from pale bisque to the darkest chocolate, their young manipulating stereophonic equipment where their voluminous pants crotched at the knees; spectral government beetles with ties askew and hair wrung out by the humidity scuttling out of the monumental white marble tombs; fry-fed families yoked to their cameras and ready to strangle each other, thankfully released from the dogged misery of touring to which they had condemned themselves by this lucky stroke of crisis and spectacle coinciding with their visits to the nation’s capital. Foreigners, too, and immigrants in all their vaunted diversity were everywhere Henny cast her eye, their outstretched arms with a five-dollar bill fluttering from their fists reaching out toward the peddler in the shimmering lavender shirt open to the belly button and the rows of glittering gold chains who had managed somehow to finagle his way into the VIP section with his cart hauled by a white donkey and trailing red, white, and blue streamers in honor of the United States of America. At five dollars apiece, the peddler was hawking little plastic capsules filled with blessed dirt collected from the base of the Holocaust Museum, as if any minute the entire edifice would crumble to the ground in a pulverized ruin and disappear. Africans, Asians, and South Americans from such backward cultures they had no concept really as to why Jews were so vital to human existence were clamoring for these sacred souvenirs. Germans, whom Henny could always smell a mile away, waved soiled bills clutched in the raw hands they employed to carry out their unsavory private habits. Even Arabs, usually so immemorially slow about parting with all payment except revenge, took time off from secretly plotting whatever it was that they plotted, acts Henny did not even want to begin to imagine, to claim a piece of this unfolding history. Only the Israelis, annoyingly present in that crowd as everywhere else on earth in numbers vastly out of proportion to the size of their tiny, expendable state, were not buying. “They want the fucking Holocaust? Bevakasha, let them have it! Good-bye and good riddance!”—screaming like barbarians over the heads of the delegates from the more civilized nations, jolting Lipman Krakowski with their harsh Hebrew out of the hum of his leveling deafness.
Lipman’s Hebrew derived from his decade in Israel after the war, smuggled by night from a D.P. camp in Germany through the snowy mountain passes of Italy to descend into the dark holds of the ghostly ship Galila at Brindisi, disembarking in the port of Haifa to circle madly in an underworld hora with kindred lost souls. He could make himself understood in thirteen languages, in fact, or so he claimed, a “linguist from necessity due to persecution and exile,” as he romanticized himself when hitting on the immigrant Latin American or Haitian or Chinese girls in their native tongues. “I love the ladies—so what can I do?—I love them even when they don’t smell so good,” he always said. He used this line now too, in Hebrew this time, addressing a gorgeous executive type, like an actress playing the part in a movie, who was inside the winner’s circle along with himself and the other luminaries, and not only that, she had a hearing aid too just like his; despite her richly deserved vanity she could not fully hide the wire descending from her ear. Their eyes had met in mutual recognition at the offending stimulus of the shrill shouted Hebrew, and he had sealed their connection by personally employing the holy tongue. There was no question that she got his message. “Pardon me, missus,” Lipman inquired, switching now to English, “you from the embassy—from Israel?”
“Palestine,” was Leyla Salmani’s clipped retort.
“Did you say Philistine? Ha, ha! That’s okay, lady, that’s okay, don’t worry your pretty little head about it. When I first came to Israel it was also called Palestine. Israel, Palestine, it’s all the same thing, back and forth, all the same, I’m a big believer in intercourse between the human animal.” Then, stung by the sight of her turning disinterestedly away from his insignificance, he called out in desperation, “Tell me something, lady—you know what a Jew is? I bet you think a Jew is a scrawny pathetic little pimple on the backside of the planet. Lady, look at me for a minute, I wanna show you something, I’m telling you, one little look, you won’t be sorry.”
With italicized indifference, Leyla turned her head to bestow on the lowly supplicant the begged-for look. In captive amazement she went on looking as Lipman smoothly stripped off his shirt and trousers to expose a remarkably well preserved and fit physique in a snug red Speedo swimsuit packaging a proud tight bulge, a flawless body if you forgave the subtle betrayal of a nearly negligible graveward sag in the pectoral zone and a practically indiscernible looseness and mottling of the skin. He spanned his well-defined muscular arms, raised his fists over his weightlifter’s shoulders, and swiveled, displaying himself like a champion in the ring. “Does this look to you like the body of your average stereotype? Tell the truth, lady. Feel free to look—it don’t cost you nothing. Go on, missus, you can also touch, don’t be afraid, it don’t bite, no obligation, money-back guarantee if you’re not one hundred percent satisfied.”
Lipman’s nakedness flashed by the corner of Henny’s eye like a bizarre streak of light in the wrong climate. Was he out of his mind, she wondered, undressing like this in public, and in such a holy place too, and at such a time, with all the media cameras pointed like a firing squad at an execution? Did he want to get himself arrested? she fretted anxiously, waddling over as fast as her heavy legs in the wrong shoes could transport her to rescue this old troublemaker’s skin from the two swarthy guards who had broken from their squad and were also drawing closer. “Officers, officers sir,” Henny cried out, “this gentleman is a Holocaust survivor. Lipman—show them your numbers! You see, officers, like cattle they branded us! Let me explain to you, officers. Mr. Krakowski here took off his clothing as a sign of mourning to protest about what’s happening inside our holy memorial museum here this very minute. You know what I mean—the takeover, they’re stealing our Holocaust in broad daylight right in front of our eyes. It’s highway robbery. Can you believe such a thing should happen after all what we went through? Mr. Krakowski needed to show the whole world the defenseless human body that Hitler, he should rot in hell, tried to exterminate, so the world should know and never forget. I can vouch for him, officers. Mr. Krakowski is a museum volunteer, a respectable citizen, eighty years old—an old man—harmless. It won’t look so good for your police blotter if you lay a hand on a senior citizen Holocaust survivor right in front of the Holocaust Museum of all places, believe me, I’m telling you this for your own good.”
“Seventy-nine,” Lipman observed glumly to Henny in Polish. “I heard what you said. I’m seventy-nine, not eighty. You’re the one who’s eighty minimum no matter what you tell to yourself and to everybody else is your true age. You can’t fool me, Henn’sche, the two of us go very far back, all the way back to the dark ages. Please, I’m asking you, don’t do me no favors—okay? Don’t try to help me out, I don’t need your help. And don’t call me harmless, it’s the same thing like castrated, with the you-know-what cut off, it’s not a compliment to a red-blooded American male, for your information. And also, if you don’t mind, can you hold back maybe from calling me an old man in public—a senior citizen? You thought I didn’t heard? Well, Henn’sche’le, I heard very good! Who asked you to go ahead and broadcast my age right here like a loudspeaker in front of this beautiful kura? Maybe now you also want to go ahead and announce how I fought in the Israeli army in the War of Independence in 1948—and spoil one hundred percent whatever crumbs are left over from my chances with this hoo-hah Arabische chicken?” Almost imperceptibly, Lipman indicated Leyla Salmani, who was still observing the scene in fascination. He referred to all desirable women as chickens, as Henny knew very well because of her name. It was a tired joke between them based on the implicit understanding that she was like a piece of wood to his arousal organs, irredeemably unattractive, she might be a hen but she was no spring chicken. And Lipman was genuinely stirred by chickens. He had been an egg candler by profession until his retirement to full-time bodybuilding and newspaper monitoring. He had a long and distinguished career behind him of lovingly cupping in his hands the products of chickens and holding them up to the light to reveal their bloody secrets.
“Mr. Krakowski is also a very famous author, officers, I’ll have you know,” Henny went on, deliberately ignoring Lipman’s infantile petulance in this emergency. “Extremely prophylactic, if you know my meaning—the author of so many articles you couldn’t even count them.” She turned to Lipman, yelling urgently in Yiddish, “How many letters to the editor did you write so far, Lippa?” She had seen them yellowing with her own eyes, pinned up over every space of the cork-covered walls of his garden apartment in Wheaton, Maryland, and glued into piles of scrapbooks cramming the metal bookshelves.
“Three thousand four hundred and sixty-seven,” Lipman answered her sullenly in Russian this time. “But I don’t need to impress these peasants, these imbecile kulaks.” He gave the two officers a charmingly insincere smile and patted his little red swim trunks. “So maybe I mixed up the Holocaust Museum with a beach in Puerto Rico,” he said to them in Spanish. “So sue me. It’s hot out, amigos, very hot. Maybe you noticed. And then this pollo comes along,” again he indicated Leyla, discreetly, as he chose to believe, “and if it was hot already, boy, did my bubble boil. You get my meaning, compadres?”
With a proprietary look, Lipman reinforced his claim on Leyla, earned, in his mind, by this close brush with the indigenous authorities that she had witnessed, an immigrant bonding experience between them as far as he was concerned. Addressing her in Hebrew, he said, “Lady, on a hot day like this there are only two things to do—make love, and eat ice cream.” He puffed out his bare chest, which revealed only the slightest of droops under a faint cumulus of white hairs, and, glancing from Leyla across the restricted area to the vendor, who went on frenetically unloading the capsules of holy Holocaust Museum dust to the clamoring customers, he added slyly, “You think maybe that distinguished entrepreneur over there has some ice cream he can sell to us?”
Henny shook her head tragically. How had it all come to this? she asked herself. Her eyes moved from Lipman, pathetic in his nakedness, to the cops wandering off bludgeoned by their own incomprehension, to Leyla, who had detached herself from Lipman’s death stink as from contagion and was now chatting familiarly over the back of the white ass with the vendor still cashing in on the devastation, the vast alien mob spreading from his wares as far as Henny could see. Lipman, too, was gazing at the dark pair on either side of the white beast. “Go ahead,” Henny heard him spew out with a shrug, “make him a matzah brei—what do I care?”
On the prime real estate spots nearest to the entrance of the building clustered the heaving mass of politicians and journalists, with Congressman Jedediah Jaspers sounding off into a bank of microphones as he loosened his tie and opened the top button of his shirt to the steamy seductions of the cameras. Museum and community leaders were conferring in important clots, officials and experts of all pretensions rubbing against each other like killer ants on the last sweet bit of crust, Henny observed. Circulating among them was that weird couple they had all noticed but whom no one could claim, the veiled nun and the Hasid in the shade of his black hat pushing their carriage with a “Remember the Children” banner fluttering from it, their dark oversize porcine baby within, legs draped over the sides, sucking on a bottle of liquid supplement that poked out from under the raised hood. Like a parody of new parenthood they strolled unmolested into and out of the museum the way the lunatic birds used to fly freely over and through the electrified fences—even as she remembered this in the sanctuary of America, Henny felt a twinge of envy—into and out of the death camp.
Her eyes followed the pair as they steered their baby carriage among her fellow survivors, stopping alongside Dr. Adolf Schmaltz the proctologist, a real doctor M.D., yes, but not a specialty you would wish for your child. From her privileged vantage point, Henny watched as Schmaltz bent his head to read the letter they handed him, then scribbled something probably illegible on what looked like a prescription pad, tore off the sheet of paper, and gave it to them. She was exceptionally gratified to note that this millionaire macher and big-shot doctor was consigned at least for now to the lowly general-public side of the barrier. Such a major donor like him, she couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t made a big stink yet, demanding his rightful place in the precincts of power and prominence. Ever since Schmaltz had collaborated with Maurice Messer in distorting history and endangering Holocaust credibility by claiming to have been the aide-de-camp to that great resistance liar, following which he was immediately appointed to the museum council and named chairman of the Ethics Committee, Henny had despised him. Then he dumped his poor Yetta like used goods for Vonda with the legs, from the casinos. Only when Henny learned that Schmaltz’s son had dropped out of school to become a Hopi Indian on a reservation in Arizona, and had stubbornly dug in there sucking mushrooms all day long even in the face of the deprogramming interventions lavishly funded by the old man, most notably the mission in a private luxury jet of Rabbi Dr. Monty Pincus to demonstrate to the boy the superiority of the Holocaust high over all other forms of highs—only then, perhaps for the first time in all the long years since she had been marched off to the cattle cars with the Nazis behind her sealing up the house in which her mother and baby sisters were hiding, did Henny feel once again that maybe there was a God in heaven after all and some measure of justice on this earth.
She watched now as the heat of the day congealed and became concentrated, the sky began to darken and blister, and the police helicopters that had been hovering overhead all afternoon started to give chase to a small commuter plane that suddenly appeared, circling wildly. As if to shelter their baby from the coming storm, the Hasid papa and the nun mama picked up their pace with their beat-up buggy, moving rapidly from Schmaltz’s humble place among the masses into the restricted VIP area. Pausing one more time before dashing back into the museum, the nun slipped a crumpled sheet of paper to Rabbi Herzl Lieb’s sister, who lowered her head and read swiftly. Passing the note to her brother, the sister then swirled down to the top of the coffin in a kind of faint, surrendering all self-consciousness with respect to how she looked to the rows of judging eyes such as Henny’s that were fixed upon her, and sat there hunched over in a tragic pose, her elbows planted on her thighs, her palms pressed into her cheeks, her fingertips raking her temples.
This was not the rabbi’s hippie sister, Henny realized as she continued staring, the lost Mara, not the prodigal dropout daughter who had caused so much embarrassment and anguish to her father, that indicted nursing-home-fraud criminal and Warsaw Ghetto partisan impersonator Leon Lieb—further heartwarming proof, in Henny’s opinion, of the existence of divine justice unto the tenth generation. This was the good sister, the proper, balabatish one, the one who had married the psychiatrist, not strictly a real M.D. no matter what they said—more like an unfrocked rabbi, in Henny’s opinion. This was the daughter whom Leon Lieb had set up at the head of his charitable foundation that funded such worthy and noble causes as obesity clinics in memory of his late wife Rose, as well as centers for the study and recognition of Jewish courage and resistance during the Holocaust in his own honor. This sister had latched herself on to the rabbi the minute that he and Lipman with Henny puffing behind had arrived with their coffin, her long ashen face exactly like her brother’s only without the punctuation of a beard. Never releasing the rabbi from her sight for a minute, trailing closely behind him, she clutched the edge of his prayer shawl like a life jacket as he carried on with his pastoral duties, leaning over the barricades to kiss and embrace and stroke the aged cheeks of his congregation of compromised survivors, greeting them as My rebbes, my holy teachers, my spiritual guides, while they in return bent toward his dimming light as to their last hope.
He was a fearless, dedicated leader, Rabbi Herzl Lieb, Henny could not deny it, faithful and steadfast at their side from the very beginning. But in those innocent days long ago, when they had first started out with their original and startling Never Agains and their Remembers, their Kaddishes and their candles, their testimonies and lessons, their memorials and museums, who would ever have imagined that this would be the consequence, who could have predicted that their small band of idealistic survivor saints would metastasize into a fatal plague of persecutees, an epidemic of victims, a pestilence of freelance and copycat Holocausts? In those early days it had been Rabbi Herzl Lieb, young and brash, who had valiantly risen before them to lead them into battle with his rallying cry against the Six Silences—how well Henny remembered being struck by the epiphany of his formulations at that time before they had deteriorated into pieties and manipulations and clichés: the silence of the perpetrators, who trusted the world to collude in covering up their crimes; the silence of the collaborators, who muted and muffled their participation in the unspoken understanding that they were victims too; the silence of the bystanders, witnesses who did not raise a voice of conscience to help; the silence of the American Jewish leadership, too frightened to speak truth to power; the silence of the survivors, too traumatized to come forward with their testimony; and the silence of the six million victims, who could not speak for themselves. “I am hoarse from all these silences,” the rabbi had mystically declared. But then, in reaction to these toxic silences, such tumult and cacophony had been generated, Henny thought mournfully, unconsciously elevating her hands as if to stop up her ears, such screaming and yelling culminating with everyone tearing at the remains of the Holocaust to claim their own personally monogrammed piece, memorials and museums sprouting up everywhere, even El Paso, Texas, had to have its own Holocaust museum for the cowboys, even Whitwell, Tennessee, had to have its own cattle car to contain its plague of paper clips, that now a little silence would definitely be appreciated—yes, a little peace and quiet, if you don’t mind, the dignity and refinement of a time when there were still no words, when the words had not yet been mass-produced and packaged and made universally available for instant consumption.
In those heady days, when the rabbi was still young and the Holocaust was still unique, Henny recalled, he had led his demonstrations decked out in a striped concentration-camp-prisoner uniform, blasting his ram’s horn and lamenting with thunderous sincerity that he himself had not been privileged to be among the martyrs of the gas chambers and the furnaces. She and her good-hearted Milton the CPA newly retired from the Internal Revenue Service, may he rest in peace, who had first taken her captive as his future tax deduction when he had penetrated the Buchenwald concentration camp at the end of the war with his American GI battalion, had debuted with their acclaimed long-running hit routine as husband-and-wife liberator-and-survivor duo, including triumphant personal appearances and prizewinning documentary films, on the Holocaust testimony circuit. And they were the real goods, the two of them, one hundred percent certified—she an authentic survivor, branded with the official tattoo seal of approval, he a genuine liberator, not one of those blacks or Afro-Americans or whatever they called them nowadays mythologized in the flush of affirmative action by this very museum supposedly dedicated to historical truth as the first to charge into Buchenwald and free the slaves. But when she and her innocent Milton first took their show on the road, those were the undisputed glory days, the golden age when Holocaust survivors reigned unopposed as victim royalty, the rewards of their universally acknowledged unparalleled and preeminent suffering laid lavishly at their feet, climaxing in the jewel in the crown, this monumental museum, rising audaciously on United States government soil, dead Jews bearing witness to the goodness of America in an unambiguously just war, and also in peace. It was an astounding feat, which Henny fully appreciated—the transformation of our Jewish Holocaust into an American memory, almost too stupendous to absorb.
Her eyes moved from the imposing museum, now overrun and crawling with the hordes of demonic baby Holocausts that they had spawned, to her growing tribe of eternally aging and dying and soon-to-be-no-longer-with-us fellow survivors. We have used this institution and the Holocaust it packages for our own glory and pride, she admitted to herself, and we have been used by it in turn for legitimization and sanctimoniousness. We have been greedy for the spoils of our suffering in the form of restitution and reparations, and have allowed our names, our plundered assets, and our dormant claims to be exploited for the greed of others. We have let ourselves be seduced by power and profit in no way different from those who had not been purified in the fires so that our entire enterprise has become fatally tainted and our time has truly run out.
“We have been guilty, we have betrayed, we have robbed, we have spoken slander,” Rabbi Herzl Lieb was intoning to his congregation of defeated survivors who had come out searching for the salvation of meaning in that punishing August heat but were now either fleeing the approaching storm or standing there wretchedly, the thin hair and translucent skin defining their mortal skulls shielded with newspapers or crackling plastic bags as the drops began to fall. The rabbi was invoking the litany of transgressions from the breast-pounding confession of the Day of Atonement descending unrelentingly upon them as summer declined to fall. “We have extorted, we have been perverse, we have been loathsome, we have committed abominations, we have strayed. Gevalt, my friends, it is what I have told you from the very beginning. This museum and everything associated with it is a corrupter and a seducer, mired in politics and deals and compromise from its conception in 1978 as a sop to Jews who were making feeble little noises against the sale of F-15 fighter planes to Saudi Arabia, and it continues to be steeped in special interest agendas to this very day, dragging the six million and the entire Holocaust down to universal cynicism and revulsion along with it. As I said to Jimmy Carter when it was my turn to shake his hand at a White House reception for rabbis, ‘Mr. President,’ I said, ‘don’t give us the Holocaust in exchange for the State of Israel.’ Needless to add,” Herzl Lieb added, looking with wonder at his own right hand, which had been complicit in insulting the most powerful man on earth, “I have never been invited to the White House again.”
The rabbi now extended that hand to his sister and helped her to rise from the coffin. “My friends, I want you to meet my sister, Rashi,” he told his audience. “Rashi, say hello to these nice people.”
She shook her head, uncharacteristically oblivious to the rain soaking and flattening her hairdo. Tightening her lips to a rippled chalkiness and closing her eyes, she metronomed a finger in the negative in front of her face, too overcome to speak.
“This is what it has all come to, my dear faithful companions,” the rabbi shouted over the fat drops of rain slapping against the sidewalk, the thunder in the distance, the helicopters and light commuter plane looping overhead, the squawking of birds diving headlong to the ground like dark mythic omens. “It’s the end of the line for us,” the rabbi bellowed. “We have given away our past, our history and our Holocaust. Now they are claiming our future too. The terrorists have stated that nobody inside this building will come out alive unless all their demands are met. My sister’s daughter, Naomi, is inside that building.”
Those who had remained from among the survivors and could hear above the rain exhaled a collective gasp. Herzl did not go on to elaborate that not only his niece, Rashi’s daughter, but also their other sister, the strayed Mara, and her two children were in there too; that would have been more detail than these old folks could process in this weather, much too complicated and strange, and far less effective in wringing out their quivering hearts. The sight of a stricken mother standing before them over whose child’s head doom was throbbing was as much stimulation as they could bear. Every living Jewish child was a survivor, a firebrand snatched from the burning, yet still the lessons had not been learned.
“Naomi has written a letter to her mother,” the rabbi revealed. “We believe that the girl has been brainwashed. With Rashi’s permission, I will read you the letter.”
Rashi was unable to respond. She was not so sure it was such a good idea. The rabbi raised his voice over the storm and read: “Dear Mommy, peace and love. I’m writing this letter to you to say good-bye. The old man in the wheelchair says they’ll never give in so I guess we won’t be coming out alive. Maybe Grandpa Leon can like dialogue with him? I think they fought together during the Holocaust or whatever. This whole museum is so bogus. Don’t be sad, Mommy, it’s okay. It’s part of the cycle, it’s samsara. I’m here with my cousins, Rumi and Rumi. They are so cute you can just die. Their mom, Auntie Mara aka Marano aka Rama-sensei the Buddhist nun, is also here for sure. She’s like the coolest person in the whole world, totally awesome. She says I’m just like her when she was my age. It’s like the biggest compliment. She says I’m channeling the Mara she’s sloughed off, so I’ve changed my name to Mara. So Mommy, if like by some miracle or whatever I make it out of here, please don’t call me Naomi anymore.”
The delivery of this letter was the last stop on the route of the nun and the Hasid steering their black baby carriage before vanishing behind the screen of the rain back into the hollows of the museum. Leyla Salmani’s eyes had followed their circuit, observing them fade away in the darkening downpour after their visitation among the survivors as she had kept track of them from the moment they had first materialized, floating unobstructed in the white haze of the heat among the inflated power brokers pressing closest to the entrance of the besieged museum. She and Tommy Messiah’s donkey were standing side by side, regarding them together.
Leyla had come over to inquire if Tommy Messiah had any ice cream. He gestured with thumb and index finger rounded into a circlet for her to have a little patience please and wait a second while he completed giving instructions to the two urchins of color he had recruited on the correct way to fill the little plastic tubes with dirt from the base of the Holocaust Museum, now doubled in price due to increased overhead costs and continued heavy demand for these relics by the public. Having adjusted the production of his assembly line to his satisfaction and while still executing a fever of transactions without pause, Tommy Messiah then managed to snatch the opportunity to slip his hand into the donkey’s carpet saddlebag, extract a few pink and white pills, and with an almost imperceptible movement deposit them inside the breast pocket of Leyla’s man-tailored suit jacket, taking as he did so in the form of his rightful payment a sly pinch, as a reminder, of the living nipple underneath. “Strawberry and vanilla,” Tommy Messiah said, “flavors of the day.”
Leyla stood frozen in her place beside the donkey, her beautiful chocolate eyes fixed on the Hasid and the nun wading into the knot of personages of consequence, wielding their baby carriage before them as a kind of implement to clear their path and hack their way into the jungle. They were doing their job. What was she waiting for? She too ought to proceed into the heart of the heart of the action, Leyla knew, to pound away on behalf of United Holocausts. The media were all in place, parched for adjectives, all the usual suspects set out like putty for her to mold, from the hard-liner former reporter, now exalted to pundit and talking head, Crusher Casey, to her old movie director and screenwriter, R. C. Hammer, filming importantly, and every specimen in between. Pushkin Jones and all the holy martyrs were fulfilling their part, sacrificing themselves inside the museum, relying on her on the outside to articulate in the cool persuasive polish of her Oxford English the message of United Holocausts. Her own people too were counting on her for special recognition, among the hosts of all the other Holocausts, of their Palestinian Holocaust perpetrated to rectify that holiest-of-holies Holocaust of the Jews to which the entire world was required to pay daily deference and render hourly homage. Really, she ought to seize the opening of the wake created behind the progress of the pram, Leyla knew, in order to reenter the precincts of influence and power, but for the moment she was unable, she felt for the moment dull and emptied, as if all her energy were leaking into a shameful little puddle forming on the sidewalk around her like the dung dropping under the donkey. To lift a foot and take a single step forward was beyond what she could imagine.
Not removing her eyes from the shadowy couple as they smoothly penetrated the innermost circles with their weird offspring, with a subtle sweep of her hand, as if she were wiping her mouth, Leyla positioned one of Tommy Messiah’s pills in the well of her tongue, worked up a quantity of saliva, and swallowed it down. Then she took another, just in case. She recognized the Hasid of course from his past life as a shabab, for which, it seemed, he was now making demented atonement, and the nun too was known to her, but the deformed creature in the buggy was a special effect wrought by these two creative types of their own peculiar devising—she wondered what could possibly have possessed such a pro as Pushkin Jones to sign off on such grotesquerie. The alarming thought struck her that the contents of that carriage might even be the monstrous offspring of her old companion, the fanatic settlement leader Yehudi HaGoel, behind whom in an hourof wild recklessness she had ridden on the bare backs of white stallions over the brown hills of Judea, admitting him into the secret chambers of her citadel, where he had planted his bomb and blown off her father’s legs. This strange fruit of one of his wives, named in a dead language for the onset of the redemption, as a child almost transparent in her slightness, had been lowered by a rope through the most minuscule of orifices in the floor of Al-Haram Al-Ibrahimi, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Leyla had heard, to seek out the haunted beds of the forefathers and mothers in the subterranean caves below. After that, the girl was never again the same, or so the story goes, like the docile boy Isaac after he was bound atop the altar on Moriah. Abraham had descended from the mountain without him, alone. Or more to the point, without Ishmael. It had been over the throat of his other son, Ishmael, her own untamed ancestor falling upon all of his brothers, Leyla was convinced, that the father had brandished his knife on the mountaintop.
Ishmael and Isaac, two traumatized sons of one God-obsessed father. No record exists that they ever had contact again with their faith-crazed old man until together they buried him in the Cave of the Machpelah. Arab and Jew, partners in the business of death, bleeding into each other, like Shahid metamorphosed into a Hasid, Leyla reflected, the boy who was once his father’s plumage, groomed for splendor and legend, swindled by the rabbis into trading in the material rewards of Islam in paradise for the material rewards of the Jews in the Garden of Eden, seventy-two perfumed houris with translucent skin and eternally renewable virginities forfeited in exchange for an old wife converted into a footstool reeking of overcooked wild ox and leviathan, a lousy deal in anyone’s book. Leyla’s eyes followed Shahid, freely infiltrating the innermost circles nearest to the museum with the buggy and the veiled sister at his side. Had he still resembled the lithe Arab boy with the checked kaffiyeh drawn across his face and the taut slingshot taking aim in the alleys of Ramallah that he once was in an earlier chapter, it would have been inconceivable for him to be admitted into those rarefied zones. Here was the best of all incognitos, Leyla saw, if only he could still be enticed and conscripted. Who would suspect a pious Jew? Under his fringed garment they would strap enough explosives to blow up the entire Israeli Knesset and all of its Jewish clowns one sunny day as the Arab delegation sucks in the fragrant smoke of their narghiles in their bright new cabanas on the beaches of Tel Aviv; in the creamy satin band inside his black Borsalino hat a dagger would be slipped with which to overcome the pilot in the cockpit and slam the jet with all of its passengers swaying in prayer into the sands of the Negev, straight into the nuclear reactor of Dimona, which doesn’t exist.
“Too Jew for you?” Tommy Messiah whispered into her ear, cohabiting her thoughts, his eye, like hers, on the Hasid while not for even one second divesting from pushing his dirt. “Checked out Shimshon lately? This is his ass.” He gave the donkey’s bridle an emphatic tug.
This was the jolt Leyla needed to propel herself forward. She began to make her way toward the ring of the movers and shakers nearest to the hijacked museum. Yes, she knew she had recognized this ass from somewhere, she realized as she approached the epicenter. She had seen Shimshon straddling its bare back, riding among the olive trees along the terraced hills of Samaria. This was only a short while after he had been released from Tel Mond prison, where he had been sent on drug-dealing charges, and where, until his spectacular penance and return to the original faith under the influence of fellow inmates serving time for conspiring to replace the golden Dome of the Rock with the Third Temple, he had sat in his cell all day composing his pathetic letters to her, expecting a reply merely because for once in his life this Zionist boor had done the gallant thing and taken the rap on himself rather than passing the buck, as usual, to the woman who made him do it, the woman who had beguiled him. Leyla had been behind the wheel of her silver Mercedes with the top down when she had spotted him on the ass. Her hair was bound up in her silk Hermes scarf, her eyes were protected from betraying her by her celebrity shades, and Abu Shahid was beside her in the passenger seat, smoking a foul-smelling Noblesse to which he had remained true from his bohemian days in Sheikh Jarrah and Abu Tor, flicking the ashes onto the road, when they were inconvenienced by being obliged to come to a complete halt to allow the procession of jokers to pass: Shimshon with full black Nazirite beard riding atop the ass in his Israelite turban and white biblical tunic with its blue fringes, strumming a Davidic harp; behind him a bride, arrayed in a golden crown delineating the walls of the old city of Jerusalem, being transported to her domed wedding canopy in a royal Solomonic litter carried on poles by four bearers, among whom Leyla immediately recognized the hallucinating twins Eldad and Medad, from the class trip to the Auschwitz death camp so many years before, adorned in wreaths of rosemary and myrrh. “I know that guy,” Leyla had said to Abu Shahid. “An ex-con. A dealer in Ecstasy.”
What sort of comfort might now be derived from the recognition that, as Tommy Messiah had correctly insinuated, however extreme Shahid might appear in his Jewish emanation—and he was definitely a cultic case, Leyla kept her eye fastened upon him as she drew closer to where the Hasid and his nun with their carriage were navigating the labyrinth of eminences—next to a freak like Shimshon he looked more or less like one of the boys? But the real question was, Who in a million years would ever have imagined that she would run into Shimshon’s white ass again of all asses, right here on Fourteenth Street in Washington, D.C., in front of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, of all places, in the middle of a takeover crisis no less? And how could she be sure that this really was Shimshon’s ass, as Tommy Messiah maintained? Was she supposed to be able to tell one ass from another merely because she was from the Middle East? Wasn’t it possible, after all, that the livestock had simply strayed across the street from the Department of Agriculture? Above all, why in the world would Tommy Messiah have gone to all the trouble and expense of importing an ass for special effects all the way from the Holy Land when no doubt there were more than enough available right here in the land of plenty, in Christian America, where snow-white redemption asses were probably already being mass-produced just as red heifers were being bred, perfect and without a blemish, for purification rituals in the restored Temple? The answer was obvious, Leyla finally understood. Tommy Messiah was putting her on; he had invented this preposterous story of Shimshon’s ass either to test her or to make a fool of her—to test if she got the joke, to make an ass of her by pushing in her face the corrosive fact that she was the joke.
Stiffening to shake off her own female absurdity and fraudulence, Leyla now sought to position herself among the main players in the inner circle, where, she noted, not a single other woman was present. She took pains to keep as far away as possible from the representatives of alternative Holocausts who had materialized to stake their claim as word of the universalist occupation of the museum spread. It was not only critical to establish her position as the chief intermediary and public relations spokesman for United Holocausts, a coalition of serious prime-time Holocausts in every way at least as worthy as the Jewish Holocaust, but for Leyla personally, it was no less important to ensure that the Palestinian Holocaust, her own people’s naqba, be accorded its rightful place in the first tier of the pantheon of Holocausts. True, the credo of United Holocausts was to respect all Holocausts equally in all their multifarious diversity of suffering and victimization, but Leyla was exquisitely mindful to keep her distance publicly from the chicken holocaust lady, for example, who, even in that heat, was present to bear witness in her heavy feathered costume strung with heartbreaking photos of abused poultry rescued from the processing industry, pounding on her drum and chanting, “All broilers are my brothers, all fowl are my ‘family.’” The ferret holocaust, the mad cow holocaust, the experimental and research animals holocaust, the right-to-bear-arms holocaust, the Confederate flag holocaust, the Falun Gong holocaust, the witches and Wiccans holocaust, the aliens and extraterrestrials holocaust, and so on and so forth across a topography populated by seeming crackpots and cranks—each and every one of these lowercase holocausts without exception had to be shunned in the short run for the sake of the ultimate legitimization and triumph of their cause.
For this strategic reason, Leyla also pretended not to notice her old friend from the interfaith and feminist and human rights scene in Greater Israel or Greater Palestine, depending on which side of the line you squatted at, Ivriya Himmelhoch—because Ivriya’s deserted wives holocaust, and more specifically her Jewish deserted wives holocaust, her agunot’s holocaust of wives chained by the harshness of rabbinical decree to husbands who had vanished without a trace or a death certificate, was, while worthy, by no means a major-league Holocaust. Technically, it was a sub-subspecialty of the larger Women’s Holocaust—in some respects, though far less understandable and forgivable in cultural and human terms, like the murders by blood relatives of Muslim women accused of dishonoring their families, another subcategory of the Women’s Holocaust that happened to be close to Leyla’s heart but that also regrettably had to be put for the moment on the back burner in the overriding interest of the greater joint effort.
Leyla had heard through the New Age and interfaith and vegan grapevine that Ivriya was in the States to advocate on behalf of the deserted wives of the World Trade Center in New York, which had been reduced to the dust from which it had risen. This was an added reason to try to avoid her, since of course there was the delicate issue that it had been Leyla’s own people, provoked beyond endurance by a justified hatred of that shitty little country Israel, the cause of all the trouble, and its best friend America, who had ignited the conflagration resulting in these deserted wives whom the legalistic rabbis now refused to release into widowhood, rejecting as proof of death in the absence of a body the fact that the missing husbands never returned after setting out to their regular jobs in the towers that morning in September and sending home e-mails of farewell from their offices in the fiery clouds. Perhaps that was the morning of all mornings that they had been inspired to wander off to the land where deserting husbands go, and as for e-mails, they can be beamed from anywhere in the universe, as even the most rigid and reactionary of the rabbis in their black satin caftans knew very well as they conducted their question-and-answer responsa exchanges regarding law and practice via high-tech Internet hookups—Is a golem (provided it’s not a female golem) acceptable as one of the ten worshippers required for a minyan? May a man lie in a woman’s bosom in the sunlight if she needs to check him for head lice? If your PalmPilot in which you have programmed holy texts containing God’s name falls to the ground, should you kiss it when you pick it up?
Still, it was not a simple matter for Leyla to pretend that she had not noticed Ivriya Himmelhoch. In the solidity of her wheelchair, to which she had been confined years earlier when she was still a young woman after a fall from a horse, the price exacted from her for riding carefree and bare-breasted, the Lady Godiva of the Galilee, Ivriya was a focal point and axis in whichever setting she happened to be. If she was there, you noticed her, like a centerpiece on the table. You had to communicate over or around her. She was a manifest obstruction requiring the acknowledgment of a detour, and she recognized her power. Now, as Leyla followed the Hasid and the nun with their baby carriage to the heart of the action at the very front of the museum, Ivriya followed from behind. Leyla was wedged in by wheels, and Ivriya was calling her name.
In this way they made their passage through the tangle of men who mattered, piled up against each other in a killer sport huddle, the knots of their ties loosened, great craters of perspiration at their armpits, their jackets slung campaign-style over one shoulder, sweat pouring down from their temples, arriving at the frontline just as those two museum titans, Chief of Staff Rabbi Dr. Monty Pincus and Council Member the Honorable Norman Messer Esquire son of the chairman, addressing a team of top officers in full battle gear from the highest ranks of the FBI’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms special commando force, uttered in unison their immortal words, “I’m in charge here!”
With a seamless movement, Leyla Salmani and Ivriya Himmelhoch turned to each other. “Jinx,” they absurdly burst out in unison. Then, caught up together high on the wave of the ridiculous, taking care not to break the spell by uttering another word, they instantly linked pinkies to make a wish, inspired by the remembered stimulus from their childhood games—the astonishing and potentially incredibly auspicious coincidence of two people saying the exact same thing at the exact same time, even though technically, according to the rules for optimal wish-granting success, it was the two men, and not they, who had first spoken at once. Still, the women registered their wishes mutely, with fingers hooked. Then, still precisely together, they exploded, erupting into great honks and snorts of helpless laughter. It was impossible to hold back, even as all the important men turned to glare at them for their failure of seriousness and Norman, surreptitiously checking his fly, inquired, “Excuse me, ladies, is something funny?” and Monty took the liberty in this emergency of whispering into Leyla’s unplugged ear an offer to bring her a drink of water—or maybe, from that Balaam prophet-for-hire over there with his donkey, an ice cream cone to lick? They were doubled over, Leyla and Ivriya, choking, retching up convulsive shreds of laughter, charged with surging currents of laughter, their thoughts entwined as their fingers had been, the corroboration of words unnecessary between them—trembling as one lest the terrible laughter merge into terrible weeping and tears come streaming from their eyes and mortifying wetness from who knows where else as they shared their acute consciousness of the ridiculousness of these puny mortal men puffed up with their affairs and strutting about like cocks under the indifferent eye of the sun.
A moment or two later, however, again almost exactly in concert, the two women recovered, startling themselves back to propriety and business. They turned from each other without a word, as from a mutual embarrassment, which, in order to be expunged, demanded mutual denial and rejection. To Ivriya it was evident that she would not acquire Holocaust certification for her deserted wives through Leyla. Adroitly maneuvering her wheelchair through the power clot, she made her way to the fringes where the celebrity columnist Crusher Casey was dictating into a phone his seven-hundred-and-fifty-word featured commentary for his appearance on the prime-time news that evening, to be recycled as the print version in the next morning’s newspapers. Ivriya was well aware that Casey, in his bow tie and spats and three-piece pinstripe suit, even in that heat, was a conservative ideologue and therefore not prone to be correctly solicitous of a woman in a wheelchair paralyzed from the waist down whose cause, moreover, challenged traditional male establishment religious authority. Even so, she was sufficiently politically savvy to appreciate that Casey had an unmatched forum and following, Casey’s columns were published and broadcast worldwide, he was disproportionately powerful and influential; if by a stroke of good luck—a breakthrough for her cause was what she had secretly wished for, after all—he inclined himself favorably toward her and her flock of agunot twisting their tissues in desolate unresolved abandonment, the benefits in terms of public awareness and raised consciousness could be stupendous. In the face of this potential outcome, what did her own personal dignity or self-respect matter? Ivriya was prepared to demean herself, she would assume the posture of a supplicant, hover at the edge of the great man’s overrefined orbit while he went on dictating, wheezing through his rhetorical flourishes in consequence of a full frontal assault by the allergens to which he was so exquisitely sensitive in that hot pendulous air, loath nevertheless to sully the finely spun twin-peaked silk handkerchief poking up from his breast pocket, wheezing and dictating relentlessly while rigidly ignoring Ivriya at his periphery except for the instances when he automatically lowered his hand in her direction without actually glancing her way to receive another Kleenex after the taken-for-granted appearance of the first, claiming one after another, which she dutifully placed in his palm from the traveling box she kept among her essential supplies in an easily accessible case in her wheelchair, tucked against the arm.
Cocking her chin perkily upward, fixing her eyes upon the media star with the adoration she calculated might soften him, passing the tissues up as needed to the powdery hand dangling blindly above her from time to time to receive them, Ivriya dedicated herself to earning her petitioner’s chits as Casey held forth and expatiated—opening with a witty account of the naked grab for power in the museum leadership vacuum created by the takeover, the leap into the breach of those two pushy little poo-bahs, Pincus the wife beater, whom Casey had once sensationally profiled when he still wore his reporter’s hat (and by the way, in all due modesty, Casey parenthesized, he was firmly convinced that thanks to that rigorous bit of investigative work, he deserved full credit for keeping this cowboy out of the director’s saddle of this sui generis museum), and Messer junior, that pompous little weasel and jerk; these two pitiful climbers, Casey intoned, had certainly come off way too Al open quote “I’m-In-Charge-Here” close quote Haig—the memorable words uttered by the clueless general slash secretary of state following the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, a gaffe he would drag along behind him as his main piece of baggage directly into his New York Times obituary. From there Casey moved on to an arch and entertaining laundry list of the sundry assortment of Holocaust pretenders who had precipitated this crisis, including—would you believe?—an ambassador from the so-called Fur Holocaust, insisting on a moral equivalency with the Jewish Holocaust, the entire vile usurpation spearheaded by an African-American for whom even the benefits personally accrued from affirmative action were not regarded as reparation enough; as far as Casey was concerned, and here, before ending this section with a quotation from Machiavelli concerning the fundamental beastlike nature of humankind, he repeated his policy proposal, which he had articulated several times before, namely, that every Negro male and female in America who is a proven descendant of slaves should be handed a onetime lump-sum payment of restitution on condition they sign an agreement to shut up once and for all about lowered self-esteem and being dissed and any and all other useless gripes and grievances—enough is enough, final payment, case closed. The concluding and most crucial section of Casey’s commentary commenced with a forceful reiteration of his unyielding guiding principle—No Negotiating With Terrorists, Period. This principle, he asserted, overrides all hostage considerations, all moral and ethical scruples and niceties, and, it goes without saying, all potential consequences to the museum infrastructure and collections, which essentially contained very few unique artifacts in any case or objects of value; an international fund-raising campaign of the sort the museum’s contributors and creators were legendary at mounting would do the trick of replacing every item and then some in no time at all. Whatever it takes to get the job done, that’s what we have to do, Casey asserted, segueing directly from there to the laying out of his battle plan: A lightning strike, that was the crux of it, blitz the buggers to kingdom come, all kinds of sexy stuff, swoop and poop—for God’s sake, what’s needed here is a little adult supervision! The M.O. would be a limited friendly-fire air war to storm the complex—first, by the insertion of an entry device into the roof through which deluge hoses would be trained on the targets to scare the living you-know-what out of them; then, an infusion of tear gas to smoke them out of their holes; last, if resistance persists, the delivery of a small compact bomb, neatly pinpointed and targeted for minimum collateral damage and maximum percussive and explosive effect. “Nice is nice,” Crusher Casey hurtled triumphantly to the finish with his familiar epigrammatic sign-off as Ivriya Himmelhoch cleared her throat huskily and gesticulated desperately for his attention, “but Right is right!” Satisfied that he had the handle on the situation, that there was nothing new here that he had not already seen and heard and known before, as usual, and mindful of the need to ration his public appearances as a major media figure to maintain their market value, Casey clicked off his phone, slipped it into its designated compartment inside his jacket pocket, and strode off briskly, executing, in passing, a satisfying dunk shot with his wadded-up ball of used tissues into the receptacle conveniently presented by the lap that was Ivriya.
The incident of the attempted Holocaust power grab by the rivals Monty Pincus and Norman Messer was also being communicated by Leyla Salmani, reporting through a miniature microphone attached to her wristwatch into the ear of Pushkin Jones at his command post at ground zero inside the Hall of Witness of the museum. Guarding her position close to the source, Leyla riveted her gaze on the movements of the nun and Hasid wriggling their carriage to the very front of the enemy lines, as she went on providing Jones with a blow-by-blow account of the Monty and Norman show, the squalid temporary marriage of convenience hastily consummated between these two senior museum officials who patently despised each other, conjoined in a befouled bed at this critical juncture to prevent the military types from doing what military types were evolutionarily programmed to do—launching a full-scale air and ground assault on their sacred institution to fumigate it of the invaders. “Perish the thought,” Norman the clown declared. “For shame!” Monty the straight man echoed. “The violation of violence within the holy precincts of the six million violated by violence, gas on the sacred ground of the gassed—a sacrilege, an outrage!” “It would be the Mother of all Holocausts,” Norman eked out laboriously, momentously, “the Holocaust Holocaust. We would have to erect a new museum to commemorate it.”
That was a truly scary prospect. For the moment, Leyla confirmed to Jones, all parties agreed to put the attack scenario on hold. But overhead helicopters were suspended, on the ground troops in full gear were poised. It was a combustible situation, a tinderbox that required only a spark to ignite and consume everything around it, the living and the dead in one great pyre. Now, Leyla reported, continuing with her complete eyewitness coverage as she observed the nun attempt to pass one of her letters to Norman Messer, the august leaders were battling over procedures for the implementation of Plan B—namely, how to secure the good offices of the universally exalted Holocaust High Priest, the only living personage who might embody the moral authority and cultivated prestige to intervene and negotiate with the renegades and bring them to their senses before it was too late.
“I know the High Priest personally, the High Priest’s a close personal friend of mine,” Norman blurted out, sounding to his own ears alarmingly like his father. Even so, he could not contain his excitement, sputtering out blooming corsages of saliva to keep from using the common pronoun to designate so hallowed a figure as the High Priest while at the same time swatting away the nun’s proffered letter as he waved his arms wildly in the air. But, Norman added, in the attitude of privileged insider, calming down now as befitted his public role, stretching the pleasure of forcing them to hang on his every word, the High Priest is a very difficult number to book, scheduled years in advance, a rare catch. However, if by some miracle the High Priest’s services as arbitrator and peacemaker and savior can be secured in this emergency, Norman most definitely must be the one to personally escort the High Priest into the combat zone. Naturally, Norman in his position could not be expected to take upon himself the responsibility of soliciting the High Priest due to the impossibility of personally guaranteeing the High Priest’s safety in this perilous situation. Nevertheless, like a brain surgeon making his entrance into the operating theater to perform the delicate life-and-death procedure only after the patient has been fully laid out on the table and the gross incision has already been made, Norman was committed to undertaking the risky and dangerous role of aide-de-camp whatever the consequences to himself personally, yes, provided support staff and other subordinate team members paved the way beforehand as appropriate, handling the preliminaries, working out arrangements.
“No problem,” Tommy Messiah said, stepping forward as if summoned.
The deal was swiftly concluded: fifty thousand dollars for the immediate services of the High Priest, plus a limousine to transport him back and forth from his suite in the Washington hotel where he happened by a stroke of good fortune to be ensconced at the moment in a meeting with the first lady in connection with her project on children and dogs, plus a twenty-five-thousand-dollar commission for Tommy Messiah as the fixer, the agent, and go-between—all payments in advance, naturally, no strings attached, irrespective of outcome or success, and, needless to say, in cash.
“No problem,” Tommy Messiah said again when they raised the predictable obstacles. They could go to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing next door to obtain the bills, it was all part of the same federal outfit anyway, he had no objections whatsoever to government greens, bring them to him hot off the presses, in a white cardboard box tied up with string, fragrant and moist, like freshly baked rolls straight from the oven. Frankly, he didn’t give a damn how they got the bread. But the bottom line was—no payment, no priest. “Bottom line, friends,” Tommy Messiah stressed.
Norman decorously stepped back as the transaction was carried out, preferring in this instance the discretion of silence to the unforeseeable consequences to himself of exposing this operator for the crook he knew him to be. He consoled himself for his noninterference bystander’s policy with the thought that this would by no means be the first time the museum threw away the taxpayers’ money. And who could say? Maybe the High Priest would be delivered after all. He glanced at Tommy Messiah counting the loot, adeptly flipping through the bound wads of lettuce like a seasoned Gypsy accordionist. The snake had obviously not recognized Norman at all. On the one hand, this invisibility felt safely reassuring. On the other hand, considering the humiliation Norman had endured due to having been ripped off by this charlatan with respect to the phony Holocaust artifacts at Auschwitz, not to mention the major personal trauma of the museum check that this swindler had forced him to sign, such dismissive nonrecognition was profoundly insulting. His father, thank God, the honorable chairman, had managed in the end to justify the check in the ledgers as a contribution to Polish-Jewish dialogue, but for the panic and anxiety that Norman had gone through, the pain and suffering, no recompense was possible.
Satisfied that all was in order with the payment, Tommy Messiah detached the donkey’s nearly empty feedbag, deftly stuffed the bills inside, then strung it at the creature’s other end positioned just so, under its tail, inspiring by these manipulations a fresh deposit of steaming cover-up for the cash. The task completed, Tommy Messiah stepped up to Norman and handed him a card. “This is where the H.P. is headquartered,” he said. “He’ll be expecting you. Don’t forget the limo. He won’t leave home without it.” He leaned over intimately so that Norman could distinctly smell essence of ass, and whispered into his ear. “Last time we did business you paid me to get you into the fucking convent, you paskundyak. You didn’t pay me to see your daughter. That would have been a much more expensive proposition.”
Norman started visibly, as if accosted on the road by a man or an angel holding aloft a flaming drawn sword that could pierce his heart. Reminding himself, however, that divine messengers do not after all appear in this day and age, he rushed off toward the fulfillment of his earthly mission, shouting in parting orders to museum underlings concerning the requisitioning of the limousine, “Lincoln Continental, uniformed chauffeur, latest model, fully loaded, make sure it’s red, I happen to know that the High Priest prefers red,” and concerning the nun who was attempting yet again to hand him her letter, “Jesus Christ! Put her in touch with interfaith or external affairs, for God’s sake. Why am I expected to micromanage everything? We need to delegate, guys! We’re losing our Holocaust. It’s slipping away right in front of our eyes. This is a life and death situation.”
“Our best and brightest,” Monty Pincus whispered much too close to Leyla Salmani, his eyes pointedly following Norman’s exit. She took a step backward, to obtain a better view of the receding black figures of the Hasid and nun with their freak offspring swelling over the rim of the perambulator as they departed the camp of the power elite. “I know who you are, Leyla Salmani,” the chief of staff was miming through the din of her own inner buzz, insinuating himself again into the space she had just vacated. “You’re just another idealistic chick who wants to change the world—classic type who uses tits and ass to get through the door, and once inside, expects to be respected for her mind. Entre nous, babe, you and your cronies inside the museum don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. No offense, sweetheart, but you’re all just a bunch of stupid pissers and pikers. You’re headed straight down the yellow brick road toward one colossal goat fuck.”
The sensible thing to do, Leyla recognized, would be to get away from this creep, block him from using her physical existence to turn himself on through his own verbiage. But again her energy had forsaken her. What had Tommy Messiah sold her? Sugar pills, placebos. Discreetly she placed two more on her tongue and swallowed them down in a single gulp, attending inwardly for a burst of optimism, a faint pop of rapture. Everything seemed pointless, without meaning. In any case, beyond her internal borders it appeared as if all activity had ceased in the sphere of the eminent persons closest to the museum, an extended intermission was apparently unde way as they awaited the redemptive arrival of the High Priest. Utterly bereft of spirit, failing disgracefully in her mission, as she very well knew, she nevertheless could not bring herself to perform. Her gaze followed the carriage of the nun and Hasid in its funereal march toward the survivors’ camp. The heat was boiling down and thickening, the sky beginning to darken. To move forward in this air was impossible, like wading through a gray aspic in which all animation was suspended. Passively she remained in place without will, submitting to the verbal violation perpetrated by this secretion of male protoplasm closing in upon her, made even more repulsive because he believed himself to be charming, droning through her thoughts with his insider’s expertise about how deluded she and her comrades were, destined for failure, for ridicule and oblivion. What had they expected to accomplish anyway with their anachronistic sixties-tactics victims’-power takeover of the museum premises? The whole joint from kitsch to cattle-car clone would have been handed over to genocides-dot-com soon enough anyway without a struggle, and in the not too distant future. If only they’d had the patience to wait another few years at most, this precious little Jewish Holocaust boutique museum would have been forced to diversify to general human rights products to have any chance at all of surviving even marginally. Because the Holocaust is finished, passé; it’s no longer relevant. The perspective has shifted. But in its heyday, in the days when it still mattered, it’s important to note for whatever it’s worth, no one could have matched the Jewish Holocaust with its mass industrial gassings—come on, who could top that? But the fact of the matter is, finally, at long last, even the Jewish Holocaust with its gas chambers and ovens, its mobile killing squads and extermination camps and all of its endlessly fascinating fetishist exotica, is being removed from the active file for interment in the vaults of history alongside all the other forgotten centuries-old slaughters and atrocities and sufferings. Holocaust chic is out, baby—yours, mine, ours. The age of memorialization is over. The past is a story with an ending—simple, orderly, false. The future is what it’s all about now—unknown, uncertain, unsafe, like sex and death, the raw wild forces ramming out of the sky, gashing the buildings, incinerating the earth, the dark savage forces out of control.
Was he really daring to say these things to her, taking these liberties, speaking to her in this way? She was tuning in and out as if in a trance, catching the bullets, extracting the gist. Lighten up, Leyla baby—was that what he was saying?—the world is coming to an end, you might as well let yourself go. Her gaze listlessly kept track of the nun and Hasid wheeling their carriage into the camp of the well-fed survivors toward Foggy Bottom’s father the ass man, while, repellently intimate, like a fleshy-tailed demon inside her brain, his words were lashing. Too bad you guys don’t have Jewish heads, he was saying, or something like that—could it have been, too bad you don’t have Jewish deads? Instead of wasting your time on the museum, required reading today but an abandoned tome tomorrow, you should have gone for the gold, cashed in your pain for lucre. Jesus Christ, a little creativity’s in order here, a little imagination, please! Your Palestinian Holocaust, for instance, your pathetic little naqba—rather than crying piteously to the whole world to pay deference to your catastrophe, you should have demanded that they just pay. You should have shaken down the Germans for reparations, the Swiss for the heirless dormant accounts, the Austrians for unclaimed looted art, the Italians for insurance policies collecting dust, and the Jews for a cut and a percentage of their entire take. The Jewish Holocaust is your Holocaust too. Hitler screwed the Jews, and in return they and everyone else screwed you. Because of Hitler you were exiled from your gardens trellised with bougainvillea in Jerusalem, from your Ottoman terraces overlooking the sea in Jaffa, from your arbors of purple grapes on the Carmel. They owe you, baby. Where are your brains? You’re such a dumb bitch.
She did not resist but absorbed it all, partially closing her eyes and letting him take his pleasure orally even as she could hear the rain pounding down in heavy sheets beyond the canopied entry area where she was standing, and the door slamming as the limousine roared to a halt on the sidewalk as near to the overhead projection of the building as possible, and Norman Messer panting, doubled over and creaking as he unrolled a red carpet under the fine leather shoes of the High Priest the entire distance until his hindquarters smacked against the locked door of the museum. Only when she heard the shriek of the chicken holocaust lady, “The Jews are killing my pullets!” did Leyla Salmani commit to the immense exertion of fully opening her eyes again.
Chickens were being hurled out of the dark sky, fluttering grotesquely, letting out bloodcurdling squawks, scattering their droppings and feathers, striking the pavement with the bluntness of doom. Holding an umbrella with one hand over Monty Pincus’s head and waving a cigarette with her other hand, Krystyna Jesudowicz opened her mouth wide to receive the last of the ice cream he was stuffing inside in order to avoid mixing milk with meat as he bent down to pick up one of the bird carcasses. He examined the tag attached to a string around its pitiful twist-off neck and read aloud: “This is your replacement. This is your substitute and exchange. This is your penance. This rooster takes on your sins and goes to its death for you. And you? Where do you think you’re going?”
Rabbi Dr. Monty Pincus lifted up his eyes unto the heavens. “Somebody up there is shlugging kaporos for us,” he interpreted for his congregation. “It’s the atonement ritual. Yom Kippur is coming. Look up in the sky. It’s an end-of-days prophet calling on us to repent.”
Up in the sky a small airplane was accelerating brazenly, whirling ecstatically in circles with a tail of helicopters in grinding pursuit. On the ground, now that all the customers had fled, Tommy Messiah was leading his donkey and cart away. Leyla caught his eye for confirmation. Tommy Messiah nodded his head. Yes, it was what she had thought. Shimshon, of course, the penitent, the zealot, the avenger, the harbinger—who else could it be? The original kamikaze, crashing them with him into the abyss—Shimshon. He was the pilot. Tommy Messiah nodded again. And Eldad and Medad, the minor prophets, casting down the birds.